XII. NORTHUMBERLAND HOUSE, STRAND.

Of olden time London’s great highway was the Thames, and this important fact must be remembered when we would cast our minds back to the times of Hollar, who portrayed our picturesque city with such infinite art. So busy was the traffic that Stow tells us in the year 1598 “that, omitting to speak of great ships and other vessels of burthen, there pertaineth to the cities of London, Westminster, and the borough of Southwark, above the number, as is supposed, of two thousand wherries and other small boats, whereby 3,000 poor men, at the least, be set on work and maintained.” Nor does this include, presumably, the barges of state and those of the noblemen and rich citizens, to whom the barge was as important a possession as the motor-car of to-day, and an object of even greater pride. The changed position and character of the main artery of the city’s life and movement is responsible—perhaps as much as the passing of its ancient buildings—for the difficulty which we of the present day experience in attempting to enter into the spirit of mediæval and Tudor London.

As was natural, the northern bank of the great highway of the Thames held the most coveted sites for the residences of kings, nobles, and prelates. William FitzStephen, in his oft-quoted description of London towards the end of the twelfth century, tells us that “nearly all the bishops, abbots, and magnates of England are, as it were, citizens and freemen of London, having there their own splendid houses to which they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to Great Councils by the King or by their Metropolitan, or drawn thither by their own private affairs.” From the “Palatine Castle”—the Tower of London—in the east, to the western limits of the city and its liberties, the bank was furnished with fine buildings. “Also upwards to the west the Royal Palace [Westminster] is conspicuous above the same river, an incomparable building with ramparts and bulwarks, two miles from the city, joined to it by a populous suburb.”

As early, then, as 1190 the Palace of Westminster was joined to Temple Bar by a “populous suburb” of houses, described later by Stow as “memorable for greatness,” that looked on to the fair “river of Thames.” The Elizabethan chronicler gives us an interesting account of them in his day. After the new Temple, going westwards, one came upon Essex House, formerly built by the Bishops of Exeter and again new-built by an Earl of Leicester before the Earl of Essex lodged there and gave it the name which the street on its site still bears. Next was Arundel House, first built by the Bishop of Bath, and increased under the occupation of Lord Thomas Seymour, Admiral. Here again the present Arundel Street preserves the name of the Earl who lived there in Stow’s time. West of this was Somerset House, built first by Edward Duke of Somerset in 1549—a building of princely size, upon the site of which stood formerly an Inn of Chancery called Strand Inn—and the three houses of the Bishops of Llandaff, Chester, and Worcester. Beyond the Bishop of Worcester’s stood the great Hospital of the Savoy, founded by Henry VII. on the ruins of the beautiful palace which had had a chequered history since its erection in 1245 by Peter of Savoy. Next came the Earl of Bedford’s house, formerly the London home of the Bishop of Carlisle, and adjoining it the large and stately house of brick and timber the work of Sir Robert Cecil, builder of Chelsea House and Hatfield. The great hotels, the Savoy and the Cecil, still witness to the importance of these river sites, the beauty of which, however, has in such large measure departed. Another bishop, the Bishop of Durham, had the next house to Cecil’s. (Vide ante p. 154.) Then came the house formerly of the Bishop of Norwich, but in Stow’s time belonging to the Archbishops of York, and called of them York House. It came later into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, and the little water-gate in the Embankment Gardens—still called York Stairs—together with the names of Buckingham and Villiers Streets, commemorates its vanished glories.

York House seems to have been the last of the great houses on the riverside until one came to the precincts of the Palace at Whitehall, but between it and the Palace we learn there were “divers fair tenements lately built,” and also “an Hospital of St. Marie Rouncivall by Charing Cross where a fraternity was founded in the fifteenth of Edward IV., but now the same is suppressed and turned into tenements.” Thus Stow describes the site on which, within seven years of the date of his survey, was to rise the magnificent house of the Earl of Northampton, afterwards occupied by the Percies, and since known as Northumberland House. It remained the principal landmark at Charing Cross until its ruthless destruction in 1874, when it followed the fate of the old hospital, being in its turn “suppressed” and its site disposed among the buildings of the new Northumberland Avenue.

Much as we may regret the sacrifice of this commanding building and all the associations which clung to its fabric, we must remember that it had suffered considerable rebuilding since its first erection in about the year 1605, and even the famous front to the Strand was chiefly an eighteenth-century restoration. The history of the mansion has been hitherto far from clear, but the recent discovery of a contemporary plan of what appears to have been its original arrangement affords an opportunity for a new examination of the little evidence which we have. The plan referred to, and reproduced here by the very kind permission of its present custodian, belongs to the interesting collection of drawings, attributed to one of the Smithsons (a well-known family of architects of the reigns of Elizabeth and James), which was once in the possession of Lord Byron and is now preserved by Colonel Coke at Brookhill Hall, Alfreton. It will be remembered that Mr. J. A. Gotch brought these drawings before the notice of the architectural world some short time ago, by reading a most instructive paper upon them before the Royal Institute. Mr. Gotch was kind enough to draw my attention personally to this plan, which was entitled “The Platforme of my Lord of Northampton’s house in London.” The plan was not dated, but other drawings in the same collection bear dates ranging from 1599 to 1632, and it therefore seems pretty certain that it refers to the house built in the Strand by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, about the year 1605. Since, on Northampton’s death in 1614, the house changed its name to Suffolk House, we can safely refer the drawing to the period between 1605 and 1614—and its careful delineation of the garden makes it probable that it is a copy of a drawing prepared to show the design for the general lay-out of the grounds. There is a MS. note by Inigo Jones in his copy of Palladio which is preserved at Worcester College, Oxford, to the effect that the frontage of Northumberland House towards the Strand was 162 ft. long, and that the courtyard was 81 ft. square. The former measurement is exactly borne out by the plan, but the courtyard is drawn and figured as 90 by 86 ft. It is possible that Inigo Jones’s figures were taken between the projecting bay windows and porch.

Of the exterior of Northumberland House in its earliest days we have no drawing, but among a very precious little collection of diminutive drawings by Wenceslaus Hollar, preserved in the Pepysian Library at Cambridge, is a delightful sketch of Suffolk House as it was then called. Wilkinson in his Londina Illustrata published an engraving based on this drawing, but I do not know that the original has been reproduced before. I have, however, been able to obtain by the kind permission of the trustees a direct photograph of Hollar’s sketch, which is reproduced here with Wilkinson’s engraving, and shows, even with so slight a rendering, the charming delicacy and picturesqueness of the artist’s work. Hollar seems to have made these and the companion sketches with a view to his large panoramic drawing of London which was published shortly after the Great Fire, and in which one can easily see how the sketch has been utilised in regard to this particular subject. It would represent the house, therefore, some fifty years after its first building.

Fig. 80.—PLAN IN THE SMITHSON COLLECTION.

Fig. 81.—VIEW FROM RIVER (c. 1650).

Drawn by

Hollar.

Before examining the plan and drawings in detail it may be as well to state briefly the successive occupants of Northumberland House, as we shall have something to say on the changes which certain of the owners are credited with having made in the form of the building. The builder of the house was, as already stated, Henry Howard first Earl of Northampton, the son of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey the poet, and the founder of the three hospitals dedicated to the Holy Trinity at Castle Rising, Clun, and Greenwich. (Vide p. 229.) Letters from the Earl are known to have been written from the house in 1609, and in 1614, at his death, the property passed by will to his nephew Thomas Howard Earl of Suffolk, one of the heroes of the Armada. Northampton House changed its name to Suffolk House during its occupation by himself and his son the second Earl, and soon after the death of the latter it passed by the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Algernon Percy, tenth Earl of Northumberland. The new owner of the house—called by Clarendon the proudest man alive—was a son of the “Wizard Earl” who spent sixteen years of captivity in the Tower of London because of his supposed connection with the Gunpowder Plot, and in 1612 the son had joined his father in the Tower in order that his education might be properly supervised. The ninth Earl had moved his home from Blackfriars to Russell House, St. Martin-in-the-Fields (perhaps the same mansion which was called by Stow “Russell or Bedford House,” formerly the Bishop of Carlisle’s “Inn,” to which we have already referred), and had also resided for some time in Essex House. Another river residence, Syon House, Isleworth—still one of the seats of the Duke of Northumberland—was also presented to the “Wizard Earl” by James I., the year after his accession; and when Lord Hay, the future Viscount Doncaster and Earl of Carlisle, was courting Northumberland’s daughter he took a little house in Richmond Park, and we read that his barge came and went twice a day between Richmond and Isleworth.

The marriage settlement of 1642 between Algernon Percy, the tenth Earl of Northumberland, and his bride, the Lady Elizabeth Howard—who was, by the way, granddaughter of the Earl of Northampton—arranged for the transference of Suffolk House to the bridegroom in return for the sum of £15,000. Gerald Brenan in his History of the House of Percy states that the name of the mansion was straightway changed to Northumberland House, but we have the evidence of Evelyn’s Diary and Hollar’s inscription which testify to the persistence of the name of Suffolk House for many years later. Algernon Percy was succeeded by Josceline the eleventh Earl, who died in 1670 and left an only daughter Elizabeth. The house passed out of the Percy family with her marriage in 1682 to Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Since there was already a Somerset House in the Strand it is probable that the mansion was still called Suffolk House, but in 1749 the Duke’s son Algernon, who had succeeded his father the year before as seventh Duke of Somerset, was created Earl of Northumberland with remainder to Sir Hugh Smithson, who had married Lady Elizabeth Seymour, his only surviving child. Sir Hugh on his succession to the earldom assumed the name and arms of Percy, and in 1766 he was raised to the dukedom. From this time the house was certainly called Northumberland House until the time of its compulsory sale in 1873 and its demolition in the following year. Thus on three occasions an heiress of the name of Elizabeth carried the mansion with her dower.

With this historical framework before us, let us now examine briefly the plans and drawings of the building. It has been freely stated that the plan of “Northampton House” as first built constituted only three sides of a quadrangle, and that Algernon Percy, the tenth Earl of Northumberland, added the fourth side towards the river, employing as his architect Inigo Jones. The reason given for this enlargement was that the principal apartments formerly faced the Strand, but that the Earl, desiring greater privacy, removed them to the river front. On the face of it this story seems highly improbable, for a house of this size and position would naturally be approached by a gateway on the north side towards the Strand, and its great hall would be as certainly in the southern range. The plan from the Smithson collection shows this arrangement just as we might expect—the hall, a noble apartment of 73 by 43 ft., having the mediæval form and shape and being screened by a loggia or “cloyster” quite in keeping with the fashion during the opening years of James I.’s reign. It seems scarcely possible that the planning of the southern range as shown here could be by Inigo Jones, especially at so late a date in his career as 1642, and indeed all the evidence of the plan, besides its inscription, tends to support a much earlier period. It remains only then for the sceptic to suggest that the original design of the house was not completed, but we must remember that we have Hollar’s evidence for the southern staircase towers, and it seems more than probable that any work by Inigo Jones must have taken the form of a rebuilding or merely a new facing to the front. The Strand elevation became so famous that Walpole attributes its design to Bernard Jansen and Gerard Chrismas. It must originally have been as fine a composition as any Jacobean building could show. The centre or gatehouse of four storeys, flanked on either side by bold double pilasters, each pair separated by niches, was furnished with a fine oriel window over the archway like those at Burghley and Bramshill.

At the extremities of the front rose the two characteristic towers, carried up two storeys above the roof and furnished with fine lead cupolas; and between the towers and the gateway the intervening wall was divided into three storeys, the upper two being pierced with windows and the ground floor having recessed niches set in square frames. Above was a parapet formed of letters, for Evelyn tells us, when on a visit to Audley End (August 31st, 1654), that “instead of rails and balusters there is a border of capital letters as was lately also on Suffolk House, near Charing Cross.” From the register of burials in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields we learn, too, that at the funeral of Anne of Denmark a young man was killed by the fall of the letter S from this parapet. It has been stated that part of the letters C Æ remained after the removal of the rest, and Vertue, and Walpole following him, interpreted them as standing for “Chrismas ædificavit.”

It is quite possible that in 1642 the Earl of Northumberland employed Inigo Jones to design some alterations in the house, the more so as we find the general dimensions figured in the famous architect’s own handwriting in his copy of Palladio already mentioned. But I very much doubt whether he really rebuilt the garden front. Inigo Jones died in 1652, and on June 9th, 1658, we find the following note in Evelyn’s Diary: “I went to see the Earl of Northumberland’s pictures, whereof that of the Venetian Senators was one of the best of Titian’s.... This was in Suffolk House: the new front towards the gardens is tolerable, were it not drowned by a too massy and clumsy pair of stairs of stone without any neat invention.” Evelyn is evidently referring to work which had just been executed, and not to an alteration of some fifteen years before. Hollar’s view, too, suggests that the earlier design had been little altered, and his drawing was probably not executed until after Inigo Jones’s death.

Fig. 82.—VIEW FROM RIVER (c. 1650).

Engraved in

Londina Illustrata.

Fig. 83.—NORTH FRONT, AFTER CANALETTO.

We have now to come to eighteenth-century records. An engraving by J. Maurer of Charing Cross in 1740 is the earliest view of the Strand front. The very beautiful drawing by Canaletto, an engraving from which is reproduced on p. 176, shows the same view in 1753, apparently after the front had been rebuilt by Daniell Garrett in 1748–50. The famous lion of cast lead appears here over the centre of the building. It was erected in 1752, and is now preserved at Syon House. On March 18th, 1780, the street front was badly damaged by fire, and was again rebuilt. Its final appearance can be seen from the photograph, with its towers lowered one storey and its whole appearance reduced in picturesqueness, save perhaps where some lingering suggestion remains of its past beauty, within its central group of bold pilasters.

Of the house and its courtyard Seymour, following Strype, wrote in 1735: “A noble and spacious building, having a large square court at the entrance, with buildings round it, at the upper end of which court is a Piazza with buildings over it sustained by stone pillars, and behind the buildings there is a curious garden which runneth down to the Thames.” There is a view of the south front by S. Wale (1761), which if it shows anything of the work which Evelyn criticised will explain the half-hearted praise which it met with from this competent critic. In it we miss the southern towers, which had no doubt been destroyed, but two ungainly wings extend themselves at either side towards the river. A pavilion and wings were designed by Mylne, and a drawing-room by Robert Adam. From Skinner’s History and Description of London and Westminster (1795) we learn that the two wings extending towards the river were 100 ft. long or over; indeed, the left wing was “a state gallery or ballroom, 106 ft. long, the breadth being a fourth part of the length and the height equal to the diagonal of the square of the breadth”! This room had nine windows towards the garden, and over the cornice another row of lights. Altogether the house had 140 rooms, and the last disposition of its buildings may be seen on Horwood’s large plan of London (1799). The pretty garden of the Smithson plan, which afterwards Evelyn commended for its tastefully arranged terraces and copses, had become but a “fine lawn surrounded by a neat gravel walk and boarded next the walls by a border of curious flowers, shrubs, and evergreens.” It was this garden which Evelyn specially mentioned as the occasion of his quaint little work entitled Fumifugium , where he speaks of its flowers as “wrapped in a horrid cloud of smoke, issuing from a brewery or two, contiguous to that noble palace.” We fear the smoke, in spite of his serious protest, is still with us, but the more substantial palace has disappeared and is but a memory.

Robert Adam’s contribution to the sumptuous design of the various interiors of Northumberland House must have been of a very important character. We owe to the painstaking and minutely particular drawings of the Adam brothers, and to the care of Sir John Soane, the fact that the substance of the chief designs executed there remains in safe keeping. Adam was employed by the Duke of Northumberland on very extensive schemes, both at Alnwick and at Syon, and it was evidently intended that his London residence should not be overshadowed by either of his country seats. At the Soane Museum are drawings of the ceilings of both the drawing-room and the dining-room, from which we may see that the former apartment measured 35 ft. 10 in. by 21 ft. 9 in., and the latter 45 ft. 4 in. by the same width. The designs for the ceilings are very elaborate—there being two drawings for the drawing-room, the richest of which is marked as executed. In addition to the last-named there are internal elevations of the drawing-room, showing on one side four lofty windows with mirrors between, and on the other side an elaborate fireplace. Three other drawings for this fireplace are also included, showing quite a different design in considerable detail, even to a complex pattern in marble for the hearth, and this is the one that seems to have been carried out. The drawings show Adam’s fertility of invention and deftness in arrangement at their best, and if any of the features of these rooms have been preserved it would be interesting to compare the charming character of the drawings with their actual execution in marble.

One other relic of the house is said to exist in the East End. In the gardens of Tudor House, Bromley-by-Bow, is a large stone gateway, which, it is stated, was removed from Northumberland House at the time of its demolition (vide The Parish of Bromley-by-Bow , The Survey of London, Vol. I.).

—W. H. G.

THE ABBEY OF BARKING, ESSEX

Fig. 84.—REMAINS OF SOUTH TRANSEPT.

Photograph by

A. P. Wire.